Metamodernism

Metamodernism is a proposed set of developments in philosophy, aesthetics, and culture which are emerging from and reacting to postmodernism. One definition characterizes metamodernism as mediations between aspects of both modernism and postmodernism. Another similar term is post-postmodernism.

History of the Term

The term metamodernist appeared as early as 1975, when Mas'ud Zavarzadeh isolatedly used it to describe a cluster of aesthetics or attitudes which had been emerging in American literary narratives since the mid-1950s.[1]

In 1995, Canadian literary theorist Linda Hutcheon stated that a new label for what was coming after postmodernism was necessary.[2]

In 1999, Moyo Okediji reused the term metamodern about contemporary afro-american art, defining it as an "extension of and challenge to modernism and postmodernism" with the aim to "transcend, fracture, subvert, circumvent, interrogate and disrupt, hijack and appropriate modernity and postmodernity."[3]

In 2002, Andre Furlani, analyzing the literary works of Guy Davenport, defined metamodernism as an aesthetic that is "after yet by means of modernism…. a departure as well as a perpetuation."[4][5] The relationship between metamodernism and modernism was seen as going "far beyond homage, toward a reengagement with modernist method in order to address subject matter well outside the range or interest of the modernists themselves."[4]

In 2007, Alexandra Dumitrescu described metamodernism as partly a concurrence with, partly an emergence from, and partly a reaction to, postmodernism, "champion[ing] the idea that only in their interconnection and continuous revision lie the possibility of grasping the nature of contemporary cultural and literary phenomena."[6]

Vermeulen and van den Akker

In 2010, cultural theorists Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker proposed metamodernism as an intervention in the post-postmodernism debate.[7][8] In their essay Notes on Metamodernism, they asserted that the 2000s were characterized by the return of typically modern positions that did not forfeit the postmodern mindsets of the 1980s and 1990s. According to them, the metamodern sensibility "can be conceived of as a kind of informed naivety, a pragmatic idealism", characteristic of cultural responses to recent global events such as climate change, the financial crisis, political instability, and the digital revolution.[7] They asserted that “the postmodern culture of relativism, irony, and pastiche" is over, having been replaced by a post-ideological condition that stresses engagement, affect, and storytelling.[9]

The prefix "meta-" here referred not to a reflective stance or repeated rumination, but to Plato's metaxy, which denotes a movement between opposite poles as well as beyond them.[7] Vermeulen and van den Akker described metamodernism as a "structure of feeling" that oscillates between modernism and postmodernism like "a pendulum swinging between…innumerable poles".[10] According to Kim Levin, writing in ARTnews, this oscillation "must embrace doubt, as well as hope and melancholy, sincerity and irony, affect and apathy, the personal and the political, and technology and techne."[9] For the metamodern generation, according to Vermeulen, "grand narratives are as necessary as they are problematic, hope is not simply something to distrust, love not necessarily something to be ridiculed."[11]

Vermeulen asserts that "metamodernism is not so much a philosophy—which implies a closed ontology—as it is an attempt at a vernacular, or…a sort of open source document, that might contextualise and explain what is going on around us, in political economy as much as in the arts."[11] The return of a Romantic sensibility has been posited as a key characteristic of metamodernism, observed by Vermeulen and van den Akker in the architecture of Herzog & de Meuron, and the work of artists such as Bas Jan Ader, Peter Doig, Olafur Eliasson, Kaye Donachie, Charles Avery, and Ragnar Kjartansson.[7]

The Metamodernist Manifesto

In 2011, Luke Turner published The Metamodernist Manifesto as "an exercise in simultaneously defining and embodying the metamodern spirit," describing it as "a romantic reaction to our crisis-ridden moment."[12][13] The manifesto recognized "oscillation to be the natural order of the world," and called for an end to "the inertia resulting from a century of modernist ideological naivety and the cynical insincerity of its antonymous bastard child."[14][15] Instead, Turner proposed metamodernism as "the mercurial condition between and beyond irony and sincerity, naivety and knowingness, relativism and truth, optimism and doubt, in pursuit of a plurality of disparate and elusive horizons," and concluded with a call to "go forth and oscillate!"[16][11]

The manifesto formed the basis of LaBeouf, Rönkkö & Turner's collaborative art practice, after actor Shia LaBeouf reached out to Turner in early 2014 after reading the text,[17][18] with the trio embarking on a series of metamodern performance projects exploring connection, empathy, and community across digital and physical platforms.[19][20]

Cultural acceptance

In November 2011, the Museum of Arts and Design in New York acknowledged the influence of Vermeulen and van den Akker when it staged an exhibition entitled No More Modern: Notes on Metamodernism, featuring the work of Pilvi Takala, Guido van der Werve, Benjamin Martin, and Mariechen Danz.[21]

In March 2012, Galerie Tanja Wagner in Berlin curated Discussing Metamodernism in collaboration with Vermeulen and van den Akker, billed as the first exhibition in Europe to be staged around the concept of metamodernism.[22][23][24] The show featured the work of Ulf Aminde, Yael Bartana, Monica Bonvicini, Mariechen Danz, Annabel Daou, Paula Doepfner, Olafur Eliasson, Mona Hatoum, Andy Holden, Sejla Kameric, Ragnar Kjartansson, Kris Lemsalu, Issa Sant, David Thorpe, Angelika J. Trojnarski, Luke Turner, and Nastja Rönkkö.[24]

In his formulation of the "quirky" cinematic sensibility, film scholar James MacDowell described the works of Wes Anderson, Michel Gondry, Spike Jonze, Miranda July, and Charlie Kaufman as building upon the "New Sincerity", and embodying the metamodern structure of feeling in their balancing of "ironic detachment with sincere engagement".[10]

The 2013 issue of the American Book Review was dedicated to metamodernism and included a series of essays identifying authors such as Roberto Bolaño, Dave Eggers, Jonathan Franzen, Haruki Murakami, Zadie Smith, and David Foster Wallace as metamodernists.[25][26] In a 2014 article in PMLA, literary scholars David James and Urmila Seshagiri argued that "metamodernist writing incorporates and adapts, reactivates and complicates the aesthetic prerogatives of an earlier cultural moment", in discussing twenty-first century writers such as Tom McCarthy.[27]

Professor Stephen Knudsen, writing in ArtPulse, noted that metamodernism "allows the possibility of staying sympathetic to the poststructuralist deconstruction of subjectivity and the self—Lyotard’s teasing of everything into intertextual fragments—and yet it still encourages genuine protagonists and creators and the recouping of some of modernism’s virtues."[28]

In May 2014, country music artist Sturgill Simpson told CMT that his album Metamodern Sounds in Country Music had been inspired in part by an essay by Seth Abramson, who writes about metamodernism on his Huffington Post blog.[29][30] Simpson stated that "Abramson homes in on the way everybody is obsessed with nostalgia, even though technology is moving faster than ever."[29] According to J.T. Welsch, "Abramson sees the 'meta-' prefix as a means to transcend the burden of modernism and postmodernism's allegedly polarised intellectual heritage."[31]

In a 2017 essay on metamodernism in literary fiction, Fabio Vittorini stated that since the late 1980s, mimetic strategies of the modern have been combined with the meta-literary strategies of the postmodern, performing "a pendulum-like motion between the naive and/or fanatic idealism of the former and the skeptical and/or apathetic pragmatism of the latter."[32]

See also

References

  1. ↑ Zavarzadeh, Mas'ud. "The Apocalyptic Fact and the Eclipse of Fiction in Recent American Prose Narratives". Journal of American Studies, Vol. 9, no. 1 (Apr. 1975). JSTOR 27553153.
  2. ↑ Hutcheon, Linda (2002). The Politics of Postmodernim. New York: Routledge. p. 166.
  3. ↑ Okediji, Moyo (1999). Harris, Michael, ed. Transatlantic Dialogue: Contemporary Art In and Out of Africa. Ackland Museum, University of North Carolina. pp. 32–51. Retrieved July 26, 2014.
  4. 1 2 Furlani, Andre (Winter 2002). "Guy Davenport: Postmodern and After". Contemporary Literature, Vol. 43, No. 4. p. 713. JSTOR 1209039.
  5. ↑ Furlani, Andre (2007). Guy Davenport: Postmodernism and After. Northwestern University Press.
  6. ↑ Dumitrescu, Alexandra. "Interconnections in Blakean and Metamodern Space". On Space. Deakin University. Archived from the original on March 23, 2012. Retrieved September 15, 2011.
  7. 1 2 3 4 Vermeulen, Timotheus; van den Akker, Robin. "Notes on Metamodernism". Journal of Aesthetics and Culture, Vol. 2 (2010): 1–14. Retrieved 28 July 2014.
  8. ↑ Eve, Martin Paul. "Thomas Pynchon, David Foster Wallace and the Problems of Metamodernism". Journal of 21st-century Writings, Vol. 1, no. 1 (2012). Retrieved 28 July 2014.
  9. 1 2 Levin, K. (15 October 2012). "How PoMo Can You Go?". ARTnews. Retrieved 14 July 2014.
  10. 1 2 Kunze, Peter, ed. (2014). The Films of Wes Anderson: Critical Essays on an Indiewood Icon. Palgrave Macmillan.
  11. 1 2 3 Potter, Cher (Spring 2012). "Timotheus Vermeulen talks to Cher Potter". Tank: 215.
  12. ↑ Turner, L. (January 10, 2015). "Metamodernism: A Brief Introduction". Berfrois. Retrieved November 22, 2017.
  13. ↑ Needham, A. (December 10, 2015). "Shia LaBeouf: 'Why do I do performance art? Why does a goat jump?'". The Guardian. Retrieved January 5, 2017.
  14. ↑ Turner, L (2011). "The Metamodernist Manifesto". metamodernism.org. Retrieved 11 June 2017.
  15. ↑ Mushava, S. (August 28, 2017). "Ain't nobody praying for Nietzsche". The Herald. Retrieved November 22, 2017.
  16. ↑ Cliff, A. (8 August 2014). "Popping Off: How Weird Al, Drake, PC Music and You Are All Caught up in the Same Feedback Loop". The Fader. Retrieved 25 August 2014.
  17. ↑ Mara De Wachter, Ellen (2017). Co-Art: Artists on Creative Collaboration. Phaidon Press. p. 216. ISBN 9780714872889.
  18. ↑ Dalton, D. (July 11, 2016). "There Needs To Be More Emojis In Art Criticism". Buzzfeed. Retrieved November 22, 2017.
  19. ↑ Campbell, T. (March 17, 2015). "Shia LaBeouf's heartbeat is now available for livestreaming". Metro. Retrieved January 5, 2017.
  20. ↑ "Sydney Opera House launches BINGEFEST 2016". CultureMad. October 7, 2016. Retrieved January 5, 2017.
  21. ↑ 'No More Modern: Notes on Metamodernism' Museum of Arts and Design, Retrieved June 19, 2014.
  22. ↑ 'The Metamodern Mindset' Berlin Art Journal, Retrieved June 26, 2014.
  23. ↑ 'Discussing Metamodernism with Tanja Wagner and Timotheus Vermeulen' Archived 2014-06-19 at Archive.is Blouin ARTINFO, Retrieved June 19, 2014.
  24. 1 2 'Discussing Metamodernism' Archived 2013-03-28 at the Wayback Machine. Galerie Tanja Wagner, Retrieved June 19, 2014.
  25. ↑ Moraru et al"", "American Book Review" 34:4 (2013)
  26. ↑ Gheorghe, C. "Metamodernismul sau despre amurgul postmodernismului". Observator Cultural. Retrieved 16 July 2014.
  27. ↑ James, David and Urmila Seshagiri. "Metamodernism: Narratives of Continuity and Revolution, Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 129: 1 (January 2014): 87–100.
  28. ↑ Knudsen, S. (March 2013). "Beyond Postmodernism. Putting a Face on Metamodernism Without the Easy Clichés". ArtPulse. Retrieved 14 July 2014.
  29. 1 2 Hight, Jewly. "Sturgill Simpson's New Set is a Mind-expanding Take on Country Traditionalism". Country Music Television (May 8, 2014). Retrieved July 6, 2014.
  30. ↑ Pritchard, Daniel Evans. "Weekly Poetry Links". Boston Review (July 24, 2013). Retrieved July 5, 2014.
  31. ↑ Welsch, J.T. John Beer's The Waste Land and the Possibility of Metamodernism. British Association for Modernist Studies (June 26, 2014). Retrieved July 5, 2014.
  32. ↑ Vittorini, Fabio (2017). Raccontare oggi. Metamodernismo tra narratologia, ermeneutica e intermedialità. Bologna: Pàtron. p. 155. ISBN 9788855533911.
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